[PTA] PTA on a Virtual Tabletop

Hey everyone,

At Gencon '07, I played my first game of PTA. I was lucky enough to play with a bunch of cool guys in a Star Wars Episode 50 session that completely rocked my con. I got my own copy for Christmas from my lovely wife and ever since, I've been hot to be a Producer in my very own game of it. I have only a couple local gamers and wanted a full group experience. So a few weeks ago, a group of my fellow Skype gamers and I completed a pitch session for a sci-fi show we're calling Sojourn 66.

In the first session, we played over Skype only. I tracked fanmail through skype chat. It didn't work the way I remembered from GenCon. Players weren't interactive. When it wasn't their scene, they were disengaged and didn't contribute. We had a decent time, but it was empty compared to the Star Wars PTA game. I realized that four people over Skype makes it tough to hear people if Producer and player are working a scene and another player jumps in with "I give you fanmail!"

So, in the second session, I set up a server for MapTool (www.rptools.net) and everyone logged into it. I set up a freen field and asked each player to create an icon for their PC and drop that icon onto compass points on the map. I then created a poker chip token. Whenever I spent budget as the Producer, I would drag that number of poker chip tokens into the middle of the map and drop them. The players could then "throw" fanmail at each other by moving the chip icons to the player token they wanted to get fanmail. So, the players had a nonverbal way to express feedback using game mechanics and they loved it. It got them excited enough to also speak up about rewarding fanmail, which wasn't an interruptive as most of us feared. The game became much more collaborative and fun.

One of the players also suggested we use the card tokens that come with MapTool to compare cards during conflict. MapTools doesn't have a deck dealing ability, just the ability to drag card icons onto the map. We had two real life "decks": one for the players, the other for the Producer. When the players drew from the player deck, they would give the number to draw to Mick and he drew actual cards from a physical deck, then put the card icons up on MapTool. I would do the same with my Producer deck (except I had bugs with my card deck, so I IMed my results to Norwood, a different player, and he put the cards on MapTool). Then we compared results. It was clunky for sure, but a nice test of the virtual tabletop.

The second session finished the pilot and the players and I are excited to move onto the first episode, this time using MapTool for fanmail right off. I wanted to share this with the PTA community in case you've wondered how to get some PTA fun over the internet. And MapTool is free.

Rich Rogers
Co-Host of the Canon Puncture show
www.canonpuncture.com